What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved Read Online Free PDF

Henrietta’s discarded suitor Charles Hayter lives. Mary, disliking this liaison, wants to turn back.
     
    Henrietta, conscious and ashamed, and seeing no cousin Charles walking along any path, or leaning against any gate, was ready to do as Mary wished; but ‘No!’ said Charles Musgrove, and ‘No, no!’ cried Louisa more eagerly, and taking her sister aside, seemed to be arguing the matter warmly. (I. x)
     
    This moment of pressing sisterly talk – of witnessed intimacy – enables Henrietta’s change of heart. We naturally assume from the exchange that Louisa knows her sister’s true feelings: Henrietta has talked to her of them before now. Her awkwardness conquered, Henrietta goes with her brother to call on the Hayters and her future is happily decided.
    All Austen’s heroines have sisters. Sense and Sensibility is unique is giving us, at first, the thoughts of both of them when they talk privately together. Marianne smiles ‘within herself’ when Elinor says that Edward has a taste for drawing (I. iv). Then later in the same conversation Elinor ‘was sorry for the warmth she had been betrayed into, in speaking of him’ (I. iv). This is confidential talk indeed: the sisters discuss Elinor’s feelings for Edward, and Marianne finds out that they are not engaged. Yet despite the movement between viewpoints the conversation is unbalanced. Elinor’s measured sentences are set against Marianne’s histrionic exclamations: ‘Cold-hearted Elinor!’ It will not be long before private speech between the sisters is reported entirely from Elinor’s point of view. In a novel so concerned with secrecy, it is telling that, while Elinor and Marianne are often alone together, attempts at conversation are often stopped short. ‘“Marianne, may I ask?”—“No, Elinor,” she replied, “ask nothing; you will soon know all.”’ (II. vii). When Marianne does finally tell Elinor the truth about her relationship with Willoughby, it is an outpouring that permits no actual exchange between the two. After her recovery from her near-fatal illness, Marianne has, notoriously, learned to talk to her sister in an entirely new way. Back in Devon, the two sisters go for a walk together, Marianne ‘leaning on Elinor’s arm’ (III. x). The younger sister embarks on a flow of self-reproval couched in balanced Johnsonian sentences such as she would once have scorned.
    There are, in fact, only five significant conversations between Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility . In Pride and Prejudice we are given twelve private conversations between Elizabeth and Jane. Their retreat into each other’s company is a recurrent feature of the novel. Volume II Chapter xvii begins, ‘Elizabeth’s impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could no longer be overcome . . .’ (the news is Darcy’s proposal and Wickham’s perfidy). This is typical. The sisters are constantly looking for opportunities to be alone together. Jane is Elizabeth’s ‘willing listener’ (II. xvii), even if their conversations commonly stage the clash between Elizabeth’s candour (in our sense of unsentimental truth telling) and Jane’s ‘candour’ (in Austen’s sense of thinking the best of people). In their crowded house, they have to spend time finding places to talk. One of their haunts is the shrubbery, where Elizabeth tells Jane about Darcy’s supposed cruelty to Wickham in the shrubbery (I. xvii). They take their moments in what spaces they can, sometimes simply having to ‘walk out’ from the house in order to be able to communicate with each other (III. vii).
    Such communication is unusual in Austen’s fiction, even where sisters like each other. In Mansfield Park Fanny Price returns to her family home in Portsmouth, to find, as well as much discord, a new ‘intimacy’ with her sister Susan (III. ix). ‘Susan was her only companion and listener’ (III. xiii). But Austen strangely muffles the relationship. Before this